The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has hit the pause button on a controversial plan to introduce a new category, outstanding achievement in popular film, after the organization stumbled in its initial rollout to Academy members and the public. But the group will still pursue the idea of the category, intended to help the Academy maintain relevance and audience amid a shifting media landscape.

“The idea that we were trying to honor excellence across a wider scope of movies was not completely understood when we announced this,” Academy C.E.O. Dawn Hudson said in an interview on Thursday. “We heard feedback from our members that we needed to take more time. We felt we needed further study, without abandoning the principle.”

At closed-door meetings at the Academy’s Wilshire Boulevard headquarters on Tuesday and Wednesday, the board of governors decided to table the popular-Oscar idea for the 2018-2019 awards season, less than a month after they first announced it. The proclamation in August provoked a strong backlash from members, studio consultants, and awards pundits, some of whom felt the popular-Oscar idea tarnished the Academy’s biggest virtue as a brand: its association with distinction and quality. Others wondered how their movies would fare, and whether a studio film that might otherwise be considered a best-picture contender would instead end up with the popular Oscar as a sort of consolation prize. “None of us knew what the word ‘popular’ referenced,” said an awards consultant for one studio. “Is Transformers the same thing as Titanic? Does a best-popular-film nomination scuttle your chances at best picture?”

The Academy had not yet determined the criteria for the new award when it announced it—one idea under discussion, according to multiple board members, was that the award should be voted on by members of the public, to encourage more audience participation in the telecast. Another proposal on the table would have Academy members doing the voting, but would limit eligibility for the award to movies released in a certain number of theaters, or earning a certain amount at the box office.

“It wasn’t quite ready,” said former Academy president Sid Ganis, who sits on the current board. “We needed to figure it out, be sure about what we were doing, be intelligent about what we were doing. Until we could do all of that, we needed to hold off.”

Other board members said the idea of the award is defensible, even if the rollout was clumsy. “We hadn’t really worked out a cohesive plan for what it should be when it was announced,” one board member said. “We suddenly realized, Oscar season is upon us, and we don’t have an infrastructure.”

“The intent was right,” another board member said. “Maybe we should have waited until we had more criteria to share.”

Though it might have seemed abrupt to some, the Academy’s announcement of the popular Oscar in August followed years of discussion and research at the organization about how to broaden its audience, a conversation that took on a new urgency after record-low ratings for the March telecast.

The Academy, a nonprofit organization, gets the vast majority of its funding from its Oscar-telecast rights, which have been sold to ABC through 2028. Hudson and four governors who spoke with Vanity Fair for this story said ABC had not pressured the board to create the new category. That notion had been the subject of some speculation, because not only would ABC benefit from higher ratings for the show, but Disney’s leading awards contender, Black Panther, seemed like a lock to win the new category. One person familiar with the studio’s awards strategy for Black Panther said the chatter that Disney had pushed for the new category because it was owned by ABC was not only incorrect, the opposite was true. The studio always planned to compete the film in best picture, not “some secondary type of award.”

The Academy’s nearly decade-long effort to reward more popular films began in 2009, when the group expanded the size of the best-picture category after Christopher Nolan’sThe Dark Knight failed to secure a best-picture nomination. That change has had the unintended consequence of seeing more esoteric independent films garnering nominations, rather than the large studio films it was meant to boost. “Over the years we’ve narrowed our scope of movies that we are honoring for excellence,” Hudson said. “When we announce our nominees in January, a lot of films are not accessible to film lovers around the world. They’re just not in theaters. We want the Oscars to evolve. We want to be relevant to and engage with our audience of film fans.”

In March, the board’s annual post-mortem meeting about the telecast felt like a “red alert,” one board member said, as the board weighed the dramatically shrinking audience. “It reached a tipping point,” the board member said. “This year on the heels of #MeToo, Time’s Up—the show had become so political. It was too long. It just veered off its mission. . . . It felt like we have to do something.”

In addition to the popular Oscar, the board voted to push up the date of future Oscars ceremonies, to combat the sense of awards fatigue audiences feel after weeks of red-carpet coverage of shows like the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. And the Academy moved to shorten the telecast to three hours, by conferring certain prizes during a commercial break and editing those honorees into the show.

In coming months, the board will continue to work on the particulars of the popular-Oscar category, with an eye toward introducing it for the next awards season, multiple board members said. “We’re gonna be working on it right away,” Ganis said. “It’s not going into the background. We’re going to continue to figure it out and to get input.”